Hollywood's disconnect

The standard entertainment industry reaction to Hollywood's box office slump reveals the same shallow, materialistic mindset that helped create the problem in the first place. The left-leaning thinking that dominates the movie business follows a common liberal instinct to deny the spiritual dimension to every problem, thereby profoundly compounding the difficulties.

Tinseltown's recent setbacks suggest a crisis of major proportions, with a May USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll showing 48% of adults going to movies less often than in 2000. For 19 consecutive weeks, motion picture releases earned less (despite higher ticket prices) than the year before. Projected ticket sales for all of 2005 indicate a disastrous drop of at least 8% - at a time of population growth and a generally robust economy.

USA TODAY ran a headline, "Where have all the moviegoers gone?" under which insiders discussed their desperate attempts to rebuild the shattered audience: "The lures include providing high-tech eye candy through 3-D digital projection and IMAX versions of movies. ... Stadium seating, which improves views, is just now becoming standard. Other theaters are opting for screenings that serve alcohol to patrons 21 and older."

Revealingly, none of the studio honchos talked about reconnecting with the public by adjusting the values conveyed by feature films, and replacing the industry's shrill liberal posturing with a more balanced ideological perspective.

Something clearly changed between 2004 and 2005 to cause an abrupt drop-off at the box office, and the most obvious alteration involved Hollywood's role in the bitterly fought presidential election. The entertainment establishment embraced John Kerry with near unanimity - and bashed George W. Bush with unprecedented ferocity.

Michael Moore became an industry hero and the most visible symbol of the Hollywood left. Innumerable callers to my radio show expressed resentment at the strident partisanship of top stars; no one ever complained about the lack of 3-D digital projection or alcoholic beverages at concession stands.

Despite efforts by entertainer activists, a majority of voters cast their ballots for Bush. If even a minority of those 62 million GOP voters - say, 20% - reacted to Hollywood's electioneering by shunning the multiplex, it could easily account for the sharp decline in ticket sales after Bush's re-election.

Another values-oriented phenomenon of last year similarly contributed to missing moviegoers: The Passion of the Christ earned $370 million by drawing religious-minded patrons who had long avoided movies altogether. Amazingly, no major release in the 17 months since the opening of The Passion attempted to appeal to that huge, wary churchgoing audience. Walt Disney Co. hopes that the faithful will flock to theaters during Christmas season to see the adaptation of the Christian allegory by C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but that promised deliverance is still five months away - an eternity in show business time.

Meanwhile, conventional wisdom ignores all ideological considerations in explaining the sudden box office collapse, concentrating instead on purely material excuses (high ticket prices, availability of DVDs) that have, frankly, applied for years. This knee-jerk tendency to offer direct, physical solutions to deep-seated problems constitutes an unmistakable element in the liberal outlook that remains Hollywood's reigning faith.

To combat threats to the family from out-of-wedlock births, for instance, the left offers birth control and abortion - though illegitimacy soared as "reproductive choice" became widely available. On crime, liberals stress gun control - despite statistics showing states with widespread gun ownership producing less criminal violence. To fight poverty, progressives want more funding for welfare and public housing - ignoring the destructive impact of a culture of dependency and the failure of government projects in every big city. On the core question of terrorism, liberals blame economic deprivation, suggesting foreign aid to dry up anti-Americanism - downplaying the depravity at the heart of Muslim militancy that draws its murderous leadership from the Middle East's most privileged classes.

This same habitual blindness to spiritual, substantive dimensions of every significant challenge continues to handicap Hollywood. Paramount Pictures recently announced that the first major thriller dramatizing 9/11, with Nicholas Cage as a rescuer attempting to escape the wreckage, will be directed by notorious conspiracist Oliver Stone. Aside from his recent drug busts and box office bombs (the gay-themed Alexander and his documentary paean to Fidel Castro, Commandante), Stone has compiled a vast collection of anti-American statements, including his 1987 declaration: "I think America has to bleed. I think the corpses have to pile up. ... Let the mothers weep and mourn."

Meanwhile, Tinseltown will continue to weep and mourn as long as its bosses depend on the likes of Stone to portray the worst terrorist attacks in our history. Americans aren't stupid, and we're not all apolitical; many (at least a third) are even self-consciously conservative in both politics and values.

In Bill Clinton's successful 1992 presidential campaign, his staff kept focused with the help of a sign: "It's the economy, stupid." In their campaign to bring back disillusioned moviegoers, Hollywood's honchos ought to consider similar signs, reminding themselves, "It's the values, stupid."

Yes, we spoke about that earlier.

Spielberg, in a way, rescued Disney because he showed how childhood could be depicted in a way that wasn't nauseatingly saccharine. Disney in the 70's was an industry joke. And when you have become an industry joke you will find it hard to recruit talent. You will become what Disney was then, a place where hacks churned out the same junk they had been doing for the past 20 years. It required a brilliant director, someone who would never have worked for 70's Disney, to rewrite the template.

And Spiderman is very true to its source, which has always had a pretty broadbased appeal. The superhero with everyman problems is highly approachable.

Batman is way too heavy for broad appeal, at least if he's done true to the source. Which is fine, broad appeal shouldn't be considered the be all and end all of stuff. There are different demographics in the world and they can be served by different entertainment.

I'll probably rent Bad News Bears, I'm just not sure I'm read to accept someone other than Mathau.

Cannes is the self important boobs in the entertainment business at any given moment.

If the studio thought it would be such a flop how did it open in so many theaters? Those prints weren't cheap to make back then, and they weren't fast to make either. Maybe before production started they thought it might have limited appeal, but once things got rolling everybody knew they had a hit on their hands.

I don't decry Spielberg because his movies are popular, I decry Spielberg because popularity is the goal of so many of his movies. He sold out his artistic vision for dollar sign vision. My problem with Spielberg is that he CAN be a brilliant director, but he stopped putting in that level of effort, now he's a mass market director still called an artist because of his occasional "important" movie and the rep he built in his early struggling artist days. He's got a fine sense of what the mass market wants, but that doesn't make it art, and the way he's willing to butcher a good story for the sake of the mass market has destroyed his artist credentials for me. A director with artistic vision says "the story calls for this, and that might cost us a little at the box office but that's what the story calls for", Spielberg doesn't do that anymore. Now he superglues happy endings on stories that shouldn't have them, and sticks enough product and logo placements in his movies that they turn a profit before the first audience member pays for a ticket.

He's among a few that constitute the closest American film making comes to Art these days. Have you seen 'Catch Me if You Can'? It has a sense of constant motion based on a formal repitition of circular pans that only a Master filmmaker could have achieved. You don't notice how jaw droppingly great the filmmaking is because he makes it look so easy. His command of the medium approaches classicism. He's something like the cinematic Mozart.

" That said, I am eagerly awaiting the Firefly movie, Serenity."

You and me both! I went to see a prescreening with my dh, and the movie was awesome, even unfinished! Blew Star Wars completely away!

Firefly is being replayed on Friday nights on the Sci Fi Channel, the two part pilot is this Friday! Serenity opens September 30.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, you're really going off the deepend with the Spielberg butt kissing festival, I hope you've got a lot of breath mints because keeping your mouth this close to the glory hole for this long is bound to have lasting unpleasant effects. He doesn't make art anymore, Spielberg makes money and apologies, that's it. Catch Me if You Can stank on ice. Circular pans are old hat, and doing them until your audience gets dizzy and wants to puke isn't mastering form, it's stupid and repetitive use of a currently highly overused technique (every doofus director that wants to prove he paid attention at UCLA uses two or three every movie, it should be renamed the "film school grad pan").

I'd say he's more like Phil Spector, he's mastered the cinematic equivalent of throw away top 40 and knows how to crank out movies that will make a ton of money and soon be forgotten.

You obviously have your mind made up and no amount of proof I present is going to make a difference. If it's so easy how come no film that I've seen has duplicated it. Which of his films are forgotten? Even something like 1941 has a cult following these days. The Color Purple was a serious film about the African American experience not a common or commercial venture 20 years ago. Your criticism seems to based more on script which I don't really care that much about. Movies aren't plays. You either apprieciate the formal propertries of filmmaking or you don't. On that basis I thought Titanic was a great film and Art every step of the way.

The only thing you've proven is that every turd Spielberg drops on the ground you'll find a way to call it art.

Actually most of his movies have been forgotten, he makes movies for the moment. Outside of his early years and Saving Private Ryan 5 years later people just don't care. That's why I compare him to top 40 music, it's all for the moment with no staying power.

Scripts are important, all the best film technique in the world in service of a crappy script makes a mediocre movie. I appreciate the formal properties of filmmaking, but I also understand that it's a full service media, you need a good script, good acting, good filming techniques, good score and good editing.

I consider Titanic to be the end of James Cameron's good years, just dull. Sure the technique was OK, but Leonardo DeCaprio is simply not a leading man (especially not then when he didn't look a day over 12), and the story was just not engaging. I call movies like Titanic "sorority girls" they look nice but that's all they have going for them. And the fact that Cameron is still doing Titanic specials for Discovery Channel gives me no hope we'll be getting him back in full form and power any time soon.

It's a start. It's a sign of just how temporary his movies are that Lost World was the only one of those I remembered both existing and as being one of his before you mentioned them. The rest I had to look at and think "Hook (Amistad, Terminal)... Hook... oh yeah, that was Spielberg huh, forgot all about that one."

And if Minority Report had ended when Tom Cruise got lowered into the cryo-vat I would consider one of his best movies and an all around great movie. He still has potential, which is what I find so annoying about him. It would be different if he'd just plain forgotten how to make great movies like Mel Brooks has, but it's clear in Spielberg's work that he still knows how he just chooses not to.

You need a good script, that sets the maximum level of a movie. A great director can elevate a so-so script to a pretty good movie, but never into a great movie. No level of directing or acting can ever take a movie more than one grade point above the script.

'Vertigo' is a pretty run of the mill script. Sirk films like 'Imitation of Life' and 'Written on the Wind' are frank soap operas on the script level. Sirk's direction is almost a critique of the scripts. Both masterpieces. As for post 70s SS if you think The Indy films, E.T. and Schindler's List (psossibly the best american feature of the 1990s) or even Jurassic Park are 'forgotten' then I don't know what to tell you. Look at the IMDB voting.

And Vertigo is one of Hitchcock's weaker movies too (I know the critics tend to love it but really it's not that good). Haven't seen either of those Sirk movies.

The first Raiders is still in Spielberg's early period (the last as I define it, ET being his first huge sell out), and the other two are only remembered for being sequels to the first (and so much worse than the first, though Crusade was a definite tick up from Doom it still wasn't very good). ET's flopped in it's re-release so obviously it had no staying power. Schindler's List was good, not great, got a lot of extra oomph because of the subject matter (criticizing a movie about the Holocaust is a dangerous game). Jurassic Park stunk, they completely dumbed down the story and made it all about loud CGI creatures. I look at the IMDB voting and I see mostly forgotten movies. Jurassic Park only has 60,000 votes, Batman Begins has 46,000, ET has 46000 votes, Color Purple has 11,000 votes, Empire of the Sun has 10,000. If his movies are so well remember why is it nobody wants to vote on them, and their ratings aren't very good either.

Lots of Holocaust movies get critiized just fine. Life is Beautiful, The Pianist. You continue to refer to E.T. as a sellout with no evidence. There was no known market of children's films to pander to then. A sell out at the time would have been making a Friday the 13th sequel. SL pops as as often as any other film on Best of the 90s lists. JP was a perfectly good popcorn movie.

Critics love the Pianist, I don't remember Life is Beautiful.

Bad News Bears had 2 sequels before ET was even started, there was an established market for PG movies about kids. Not as big as ET but there was no reason for them to think it wouldn't make money. Kids movies were doing OK, sci-fi was on a big upswing, and Spielberg was hot. And I gave evidence: it opened in more theaters than Raiders! That's all the evidence you need, no way a a movie expected to make so-so box office opens in more theaters than Raiders, just not going to happen.

Good for SL, it's still not that good a movie. It's good, I'll grant you that, but it's not a great movie.

I thought Spielberg was an ARTIST, one of the GREATEST in America. Now you're defending JP as perfectly good popcorn movie?! Hardly the credentials of the man who comes closest to making true art of any current American director. As a popcorn movie, as long as you left all of your logical skills at the door, yes JP was good. But given the quality of the book it was based on it should have been a good movie all around, there was plenty of room for things like plot in among the special effects, but plot doesn't make a lot of money.

Not the critics I admire. Check out this review of the Pianist which is priceless in its accuracy:

http://leonardo.spidernet.net/Artus/2386/dec02.htm#pianist

Even great artists do stuff like Jurassic Park. Beethoven had his Wellington's Victory Tchaikovsky his 1812 Overture. The Bad News Bears was really aimed at adults. Matthau was the main character. It was an adult skewing of something all adults with kids would relate to. And the only sequel was an atrocity that no one saw. It didn't set any market trends.

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